


Breathe Under Water (Tune the Radio Dial)

by thought



Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, M/M, Unreliable Narrator, ambiguous ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-26
Updated: 2017-08-26
Packaged: 2018-12-20 07:29:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11916078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thought/pseuds/thought
Summary: Obi-Wan loses time. Or maybe it's the other way around.





	Breathe Under Water (Tune the Radio Dial)

It's the fourth day of negotiations when things start going poorly.

No.

It's the fifth day. Morning. His paper cup of tea is too bitter. Someone says, "We all knew this wasn’t going to work."

Someone else yells. There's a voice cutting in and out on the radio, choppy with static.

The sky is grey and there's dry grass prickling his palms and someone crouched over him, black cloth where white armour should be. He tries to look at them but there's a picnic table behind the face, incongruous to the point of parody, and when he opens his mouth everything tastes like metal.

Then, it's dark, and someone is running and his stomach hurts. He thinks of a sack of potatoes. All the trees are upside down.

He falls asleep. He wakes up.

He can't breathe. There's a scratchy blanket pulled up to his chin and he can hear static, crackling and white and unbroken.

He says, "My lightsaber," and someone -- Qui-Gon? Anakin? -- says,

"Here. I have it."

If he can speak, clearly he can breathe. He supposes things can't be too bad if he can breathe and he hasn't lost his lightsaber. He supposes he’s safe.

Things come in flashes, signals breaking through the static then fading away.

The pavement under his shoes is cracked and dusty and he can't seem to keep his feet moving properly forward. Every time gravity shifts there's a hand there to catch him. It's familiar. He doesn’t fall, but he knew this already.

The tea he drinks out of the paper cup isn't bitter, but he coughs it up anyway, body curled in humiliation on a hard plastic seat while sounds bounce weirdly around him, engines and voices and music that is too loud and always the static.

Then, quiet, but too much movement and the smell of old coffee and sweat and he presses his face into a familiar shoulder and he can breathe so he is safe.

"Look at me. Just, focus. Just for a second. Look at me." He trusts that voice with his life so he looks and the flash hurts his eyes but he keeps staring forward until a familiar hand touches his cheek.

"Ok. It's ok. You can stop."

So he does.

More movement, rougher, this time. Smell of smoke and something heavy in the air like an explosion and like Anakin but without the death. A child is crying somewhere behind him. It is very bright if he looks to his left.

"Sir? Obi-Wan?"

His name.

He looks to his right and the static snaps, crackles, screeches.

Obi-Wan wakes up on a bus, in the window seat. Everything is muffled and slightly out-of-focus, his head achy and his eyes hot and sore.

Cody is to his right, out of armour and he's done something to his hair. Obi-Wan isn't wearing his robes, and he doesn't know how he got here.

"What--"

"Shh," Cody says. "Shh, it's fine, Obiika, we're fine. I have our papers. Don't say anything."

Obi-Wan has never heard Cody like this, gentle and exhausted and soothing and Obi-Wan reaches out mentally in an attempt to understand and something is very wrong, because he has never felt Cody so deeply, helplessly terrified, either.

A woman in an unfamiliar uniform stops beside their seats and Obi-Wan closes his eyes before she gets a good look at him, pretends to be asleep as he listens to the click and hum of the reader when Cody hands over two green data cards. She doesn't say anything. Cody's fear doesn't abate when she moves on.

"The Council," Obi-Wan says, quietly. "The Negotiator."

"Communications are all down," Cody replies immediately. "They've probably forced the ship out of orbit. Everyone else on the team is dead. It's been half a tenday. You were drugged. You reacted... poorly. I'm hoping if we disappear for long enough they'll assume we're dead and drop the comms jammers."

Obi-Wan breathes out. "That's good thinking. How many times have you had to tell me this?"

Cody laughs tightly. "Four, now."

"I'm sor--"

"Please shut up," Cody says, then, belatedly, "Sir. It isn't your fault. The whole mission was a farce. They just wanted to catch a force user."

"A rare and unique specimen," Obi-Wan says, dryly. It's hard, keeping his head up, and he thinks all his words are slurring a bit.

"I've been awake too long for this," Cody says. "Now I'm imagining a fishing line with a tea bag at the end."

"There are days it would probably work."

"I'm aware. You befriended a fish, didn't you? And I mean an actual fish, that wasn't meant to come out so speciest, I know you were friends with a mon Calamari."

"I think it was technically a mammal," Obi-Wan says thoughtfully. He gets distracted remembering that mission, feels himself sliding out of the present but can't muster the energy to care. He feels Cody's fingers combing through his hair and when the static rushes back over him like water --mammal, it was definitely a water mammal-- he lets it come because he knows that he is safe.

The next time he wakes up there is sand all around him and Cody is sitting a few feet away staring into the sunset, cleaning his gun by touch. Everything is silent for the first time in hours. Days. Years. The heat shimmers off the sand and for a moment the light reflects like there's another sun, trailing behind the first over the horizon.

Obi-Wan says, "this is how the world ends."

His throat is dry. Cody looks at him over his shoulder and for a moment his hair is almost grey and his eyes are hard and sad.

"I'm hallucinating a little," Obi-Wan says, mildly.

"I know," Cody says. "You asked about the Council, earlier."

The static comes back in a rush, a sandstorm this time. Obi-Wan can hear breathing in the white noise.

In and out.

In and out.

Obi-Wan can't breathe. He is not safe.

**Author's Note:**

> Listen, I warm my cold dead heart with the idea that Obi-Wan and Cody found each other after Order 66 ok


End file.
